Is the Best Game of the Year a Failure?

32:42You only get little bits and pieces of that around the main thing you're concerned with, which is not getting mowed down by robots and enemies, enemy players. The fact that you mentioned the origin of Marathon being on Mac actually made me think that in addition to all this architecture that you talked about, there's a real mystery to this space. There are secrets to unlock there that feel almost like Myst. I played Myst the first time famously missed I think primarily a Mac game or at least one that was popular with Mac players I never played it because I was a PC person and also did not have the patience for it but I played the remake that came out a couple years ago and playing Cryo feels like you're playing this extremely brutal, punishing cruel competitive shooter and at the same time trying to solve a missed puzzle.

33:52It's like trying to do complicated math while you're in a knife fight. It's like both of those things together, which really, I think, make it special. It's like chess boxing. Yeah, exactly. And I guess now to get to the confessional part of it, I've thought about this a lot. And if I really try to tear everything away, and get down to the feeling that makes me come back to the game. What am I getting out of this? When I log in every night, it makes me feel a certain way. And what is that feeling? And what am I getting out of it? And it's pretty ugly. You play a Call of Duty or you play a Battlefield.

34:43You get in there, you do some cool stuff, you get some points. It's pretty lightweight. maybe you're playing with friends you're having a good time I love that stuff, it's all good with Marathon the game is set up there's this very carefully constructed economy that they're constantly tweaking but the joy of it is just as much about taking stuff from people as it is about getting the stuff it's not like you're doing a World of Warcraft raid and something drops from an NPC and then maybe you have to decide who gets it. It's like, we went into Cryo, we came in there with blue shields, and we ran into a team with gold shields and they had extremely expensive gear that took them a long time to get.

35:39It's like they wore their best outfit for their night out and I came in from behind and knifed them in the back and I took it from them. I ruined their day. And that is the joy of the game. And it seems built in. That's part of Tarkov as well. It's like this rags to riches dynamic. I came in with nothing. I saw a bigger fish. I ruined their lives. Now I'm the winner. And then most of the time, somebody else is doing that to you, right? But it is inherently a very cruel, dynamic, more than any other game, type of game that I can think of. I don't know. It seems to be feeding on a pretty dark human emotion.

36:25It is. I think that's sort of inherent to the genre. But I also do think Marathon is one of the softer ones of these. I played Tarkov. Tarkov is basically like, what if we made a game out of Hobbes' state of nature? There is no pro-social element in Tarkov. It is entirely like you are being lowered into this most dangerous game scenario, and the only thing to do with other players is mow them down. That's kind of it. I've played a fair bit of Hunt Showdown, and that has a little more going on. You can definitely get out with a lot of loot, and you don't necessarily have to go fight other players, but really you do.

37:14There's not a ton of other stuff to do. You're kind of a schmuck if you're fighting the zombies on those maps. Really, the source of treasure on the map is the other players, and you're kind of using map dynamics to lure them in the scenarios where you can get them. marathon and this is a bit more where where i play it and i think this is partly because you are usually with a full team of three i am often playing alone or with one other person and sometimes with three uh and the game becomes a very different game based on those experiences uh and actually i think in some ways like you are kind of talking almost about like two or three different constructions of Marathon, which I think is another reason why it's so compelling.

38:04When you were playing it solo, it is closer to a game I got into a while ago was The Hunter. It was a deer hunting sim made, I think, in the CryEngine. But when it first came out, it was just this hauntingly gorgeous simulation of outdoor space and then really realistic hunting dynamics. You spend most of your time just wandering around following deer trails, looking for their scat, things like that. And then a 40-minute play session might build to a single rifle shot across a meadow to see if your hunt went well or not. Marathon as a solo experience can be almost that, where it is, I know I'm on a map with other players alone.

38:54We're all lone wolves. Some people are out there actively trying to hunt other players. Some are just trying to get out with loot. Some are more opportunistic, but you're out there always listening and thinking about, what are other people trying to do? It's kind of weird that I haven't heard anyone on this side of the map all match. That probably means there's a stalker out there. The map couldn't have started if someone wasn't here. So if it's been quiet, that means someone's being quiet for a reason. That means bad things. And so there's parts of this that, it feels really good when you mow someone down and take all their stuff.

39:31But there's also versions of the game where it is, you have everything but the gun battle. You sort of like, you know, read the situation. You're staring at the team through your gun sights and you're thinking about it. You're discussing with your friends, like, do we want to take this fight or not? Let's see what they do. And you let them go because you just didn't want to pull the lever and see what the slot machine spits out on that encounter. And so I think in some ways, what is like marathon gives you a lot of ways to have what feels like a really good triumphant run without ruining anyone's day.

40:05But there's always the risk that someone's going to try to ruin yours. And there's always the incentive to maybe try and ruin someone else's. And I think that is part of what makes it so arresting is that so many games, and I think this sort of put the more positive spin on sort of what you're saying. So many games are designed to just give you reward stimuli. That's it. You log in and you can feel the degree to which you're being treated like a rat in a Skinner box, right? Where anything you do, the game gives you feedback. Hey, great job. look at all this loot, look at all this treasure you've got.

40:50Are you having a good time? Like, let's move on to the next thing. And it can feel almost cloying because these things are tuned to constantly give you those rewards and that positive feedback and that affirmation. And you're sort of sitting there being like, I haven't done very much. Like, this has actually been incredibly untaxing and increasingly uninteresting. I haven't done anything that makes any of this feel special. I'm getting, you can sort of, I open a treasure chest. There's a loot table with odds that is populated behind it, and that's all that's happening. But I am not doing anything that requires attention, skill, judgment, perception.

41:28None of that is really being engaged. The extraction shooter, to get the most out of it, demands all of that from you. And so the stakes feel more real, so do the victories. Whether or not the victories are at the expense of another player or not, just surviving on these matches and extracting with all your loot requires a degree of deliberation and knowledge and focus that so few other games expect or demand. And I think that way more than you're out there wrecking someone's day or taking their stuff, that feeling of, I am fully engaged with this task. If I want anything out of this, I have to be, I have to be standing on my head for the next 25 minutes.

42:18That is the addiction.

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47:36So we spent, I think, 30 minutes now explaining why we think this game is so good and so special. I'm going to look over at my second monitor now. I'm looking at Steam Charts, which is a website that tracks player numbers. I have to give the obvious caveat that it's like, the tracking here is imprecise. People are playing on other platforms. The tracking on Steam itself is not precise. Really, when you're looking at Steam Charts, you're comparing it to other numbers on Steam Charts. It doesn't tell the whole story. All that being said, according to Steam Charts, there's 3 ,600 people playing the game right now uh the peak in the past 24 hours meaning the most number of people who have been on at any given point in the last 24 hours is almost 8 ,000 and the all-time peak in the past four months is 88 ,000 as marathon a dead game when you see those numbers given the size of Bungie as a studio, its pedigree, the investment that PlayStation has made in the studio.

48:51How do you gauge the success as an outsider of this game as a business? That is hard because so much of this is opaque, but these are not the numbers you want to see from a new game from a studio of Bungie stature, especially in the context of, again, the$3.6,$3.7 billion that Sony paid for it. However, it is an odd thing because I think the people who are playing it are having a very, very good time. There are moments where games are so dead that it becomes kind of non-viable as a game. And I think we'll get to some of the reasons why that is. But basically, as casual players fall away, you have a game increasingly dominated by very serious hardcore players, which becomes sort of its own death spiral.

49:38Now the game is demanding way too much, even of people who are focused on it. And it ceases to be fun for even moderate sickos. And then the hardest of hardcore sort of consume what is left. But you need a healthy ecosystem of new players trying it out, casual people coming in that can be matched in the games with each other and sort of have it feel appropriately balanced to where they're at in the game. And Marathon is sort of at the lower bound of what is viable for a game to maintain those dynamics. and I think what's concerning at this stage is there's nothing indicating there's a positive trend that it still has a shallow downward curve and a shallow downward curve is good right like there are games that they just they fall off the cliff and they are truly dead that they haven't been able to arrest that a shallow downward curve is just sort of a typical pattern that suggests that people are not falling away very quickly or easily and if you do something different you could possibly create an upward trajectory in that curve but you are starting from a place that is well well short of where you want it to be and that is that's going to make it tricky because that determines future resources.

51:05Is Marathon a game that Bungie will be allowed to continue investing in given where it's at or Or will the directive from their owners at Sony be? This is a miss. You guys need to figure out something else to do because this is not a game that has any, even a successful version of this where we get the curve sloping up and grow this audience. Where we are starting from, the reasonable expectations of success from here are just not in line with what we need and demand. And so that could leave the game in a very, very dire place. However, these are all tricky things to assess because launching games, especially live service games like this, has gotten so much harder in the last 10 or 15 years.

51:57It is hard now to build a strong brand identity that resonates with people and they're aware of. and so you know it is very easy to imagine a scenario where you sort of look at a game like this and it's not doing anywhere near what we hoped but if you look at like the top hell even past the top 25 of like games on steam you're looking at games that have been around for a long time like you are you are up against so many games that are basically lifestyles in and of themselves you were never going to crack into that tier because they already have this huge audience like in some ways this game musical chairs that was played and won over the last decade now you're now you're a late comer to it and so now you're you're you're looking at uh well what is the trajectory a game like this can go on from here.

52:57And you're sort of clawing your way towards a lot of other games in a similar zone, right? You're clawing your way towards newer games that are also struggling to find an audience. However, it doesn't help that with Marathon, Sony has points of comparisons like Helldivers. They did work on a game that blew up huge. Unexpectedly huge for them, but that is a game that still has a lot of people playing it. Marathon could be viewed as a competitor to Arc Raiders. Arc Raiders has, you know, five, six, maybe more times as many players who were engaged with it. It is the more successful product. is there a world where Sony can see Marathon clawing its way into that tier where it is at least more successful relative to peer products that is a question that is hard for me to answer for me I look at it as this is a really really good game it doesn't it's a lot to walk away from the question then becomes how can you make a version of marathon that will speak to a wider wider audience have you have you left space here for you to do something else that can pull people in who are a little more casual maybe a little less interested in the extraction shooter experience that that we're talking about um there's a meme going around right now our story that i have no idea if it's urban legend or not but marathon steve this character that hit blue sky the other day and I have no idea the degree to which this is sort of made up or embellished but it's this idea of I've got a buddy who played Marathon on Mac back in the day he was excited there's a new Marathon he plays it and treats it as a first person shooter single player and he goes in there and he shoots the robots and that's all he does he has not paid attention to any of the stuff that Bungie has designed there for the extraction shooter I think people are sort of riveted by that because it's like, Marathon is such an obscure game where it's full of all the nonsense that extraction shooters are chock full of.

55:25Worrying about loadouts, the specifics of what equipment you attach to other equipment, loot tables, all these things. The notion that somebody can just bypass all of that and still have a good time is kind of marvelous. But I also think that story's got some legs because people are thinking about... There is... Like, Marathon Steve stands in for a type of player that's very different from your typical abstraction shooter where they kind of just want to have a good time in a cool world. And they're happy to play a Bungie game like it's Halo, like it's the original Marathon. And whether or not the story is true, you can sort of imagine people at Bungie and Sony trying to figure out, we would be well served to find something to offer the Marathon Steves of the world that can then maybe open a gateway into other parts of Marathon for them.

56:25But there's an unsatisfied appetite for things that are not the extraction shooter, but are things to do in a Bungie world, in this world even. They're not sort of what we conceived as the very hardcore, serious gameplay loop. Yeah, and you get the sense that they are experimenting with pushing the game in that direction. They announced some modes that separate, if players wish, themselves from the psychos like me who are just looking to get in there and cause pain. We played one of them. And we had low-key, one of my favorite days of Destiny, because it was one of the few times where it was you, me, and Matthew Galt.

57:14We don't talk about stuff during most marathon games because you're so on mission. And we were having a rough morning, and we were doing quests that kept feeding us into the path of other players and getting us killed. And so we went and we played what was called the PvE, player versus enemies mode. and two things happened there one was that we were able to shoot the shit in a way we almost never get to in marathon because every bit of communication is shots at shots at 225 shots 225 what are we doing it's all very like clipped uh focused communication it's all very stressful here we are just you know uh so where do you guys buy your dvds those sorts of conversations the other part of it was before we finished that map we ended up in a huge gun bell with um one of the boss type uh enemies that that sort of see the seed into the game a sort of gold shield giant robot uh that pulls in in the mmo parlance like adds uh add continues adding additional robots to keep fighting you and that was a huge knockdown drag out shootout uh this thing had so many hit points and there were so many ads that we were sort of burning through all our weapon stocks i was running around the map uh picking up like you know half loaded rifles to shoot a few more rounds and then trying to find where i could find more more stuff to shoot these guys with that was a blast and it did remind me that like oh underneath all this stuff marathon is a bungee game and this was like a playing Halo on heroic scale encounter in a fire team where it was like wow that was pretty intense and bracing.

58:58Other players weren't involved at all but Bungie can still create these really compelling interactions between enemy types behavior and really thoughtfully designed encounter spaces on a map. Tell me what you think about this comparison and in terms of how I think about Marathon financially or as a business, I am thinking about the movie Moneyball. And And in that movie, Brad Pitt, the hero, is sitting in a room with a bunch of old-timey baseball scouts. And they're trying to convince him that this player or that player has it. I just like how he looks. I like how he throws the ball. There's something about his swing.

1:00:00I can't explain it. You got to feel it. I know it in my bones. And Brad Pitt, again, the hero of the movie, is like, you're full of shit. The numbers don't line up. Here's the spreadsheet. We have to listen to the data and just be very calculated and clinical about how we run this team. And in this comparison, when I think about Marathon, I find myself to be more like the old scouts. where I look at this game and I'm like, look, I know the numbers don't look good. I know the spreadsheet looks bad. But there's something here. Have faith. Just close your eyes and let's bet on this kid. Let's bet on this kid marathon and keep pouring money into it and something good will happen.

1:00:54I can't explain it, but I feel it. And I think there are... You can look into the past. I guess it's like maybe so far in the past now that it's no longer relevant because the industry has changed. But I think about Ubisoft was, I think, especially good at this, where they launched a game called Rainbow Siege 6, which was also, by the way, very dense and complicated, demanding game. And it kind of launched and it was like, okay, they launched a Rainbow Six, whatever. They made another one of those. It wasn't a big hit, but they kept at it. And then it's like you look up one day and it's just like this huge, massive cash cow with a huge dedicated following.

1:01:37And I think not as big of a business, but even more shockingly a success is a game they made called For Honor, which is this weird melee multiplayer game when you're playing as knights and other old -timey warriors. and it looks like a complete throwaway. How is this possibly going to make it? But they keep at it. They keep adding stuff to the game. They develop a community and suddenly it's making money. And I think both of those games are maybe fading now, but it was definitely worth the investment in the long haul. And I guess it's impossible to say, right? It's like, this is all backseat, studio management?

1:02:24I have no idea. I don't know. I have done some consulting for video games years ago, but it's like I have no idea how to run a huge business like PlayStation. But it seems like if you build it, they will come kind of situation. If they just put... There's good bones here. They keep pouring money into it. They go all in on Marathon. Do you think it's something that with time, they can make it happen? I think they could. I think it's difficult to justify doing that, just given where it is at. The immediate counter-argument with things like Rainbow Six Siege is this came out in a completely different environment.

1:03:07This is maybe where we're getting into now, the issues further afield from Marathon. We want to start pivoting toward that. But one of the real issues in games right now is that there are so many games that have effectively become lifestyle games that it's as if the number of players in the world that are a potential audience for your new game, it's as if that audience has actually shrunk. It's as if there are fewer people playing video games right now than there were 15 years ago because people have their game or their two or three games. they're playing constantly. It's the games that you find littering the top 25 or even the top 50 games on Steam charts.

1:03:58So when Rainbow Six Siege came out, this problem wasn't quite so acute. And so there was more, there's more optimism for working your way into people's habits to sort of become an alternative Counter-Strike in a way that would resonate with people. I think now it is so much harder to build an audience that you would find a lot of concern about saying, well, if we just keep plugging away at this, we could be the next Rainbow Six Siege. it's just too different environment to have a lot of confidence in that I think you could also argue that Rainbow Six Siege in some ways lent itself to slowly winning over its audience because it is so similar to a thing like Counter-Strike but it's Counter-Strike with a lot of cool character classes it was a game that didn't necessarily lend itself to this feeling of you can put a bunch of time into it and come away with nothing A lot of the negative experiences that sometimes people associate with extraction shooters.

1:05:05But the big thing is where the numbers are at right now, it is the game might be barely viable. And it wouldn't take much to tip Marathon into sort of a fatal death spiral, and it will take it a lot to build it toward that upward trajectory. However, to argue against myself there a little bit, it is a different environment than it was when Siege came out. Everyone is having this problem. Sony has had this problem. They already had a game, Concord, come out last year, two years ago. I forget what it is, but that game was basically canceled within weeks of launch. I want you to get into this, but I want to set it up a little bit.

1:05:49You said something on the Remap podcast a few weeks ago that sent a chill down my spine. I don't remember if it's your original quote or you were quoting someone else, but you sort of posited that video games as we know them at the end of the day might end up being a millennial phenomenon. Is this kind of what you're speaking of? I think that might be Rob Zachney original. I love it. So this has been a suspicion. Now, this is not an entirely original thought, but the way I put it together is there's a lot of evidence that our generation is the only one that has this exact relationship to games.

1:06:41We grew up, when we were little kids, the Nintendo Famicom came out and brought a certain type of video game into the home. And then across our lives, more consoles come out and make hardware gains and they keep bringing these sorts of games to us. And both on PC and on consoles, they increasingly sort of target us now using the shared understanding of what these games are, the shared language, the games get more involved. And so you have all these games that are sort of built on this sort of foundation of games we have grown up on and been playing for the last like 30, 40 years. After us, the next generation, their playing habits are completely different.

1:07:32Now, my comment has always been a bit joking, but kind of not really. My parents bought me video games and they bought a console so that I really wanted a console. And, you know, that was kind of like for me. Among my friends with kids, the thing I observed was mom and dad didn't put the controller down. That they continued to play their video games after the kids went to bed. The kids were given hand-me-down phones or cheap laptops to go. Like, you can also play video games. Not these video games. I'm going to be on the gaming rig. I'm going to be on the 360 or the PlayStation 4. You can go play with this.

1:08:23I don't know. It's an old Pixel. It's just here. Here's an iPhone that I haven't used in five years. Yep, it turns on. Go have a ball, kid. And those kids were, they sort of became mobile gamers first, but they were also left at the mercy of things like Roblox. not just Roblox, but that's one of the big ones. They really got into Fortnite, things that could run on any kind of hardware. And so their playing patterns became profoundly different. They sort of embraced these big platform games. And that's just kind of all they play with their friends. And they don't have... They're not sitting around looking for, man, I can't wait until we get the next Zelda.

1:09:10they didn't a lot of a lot of people in like the the among the zoomers or gen alpha didn't quite develop that same relationship and they're not going to have the same onboarding process because they're not going to have their gaming habit develop in lockstep with gaming technology and online infrastructure like we did and so yes there is a type of gamer that we are that might be a historically contingent phenomena based on accidents of like when we were born, technology available at the time, and how new technology was rolled out to us across our lives in a way that is not going to be replicated with other gamers of generations.

1:09:53And we've already seen indications that their habits are profoundly different than ours ever were. And that seems unlikely to change as they get older. it seems unlikely that as you have these people entering into their 20s and 30s, they're going to wake up and say, I really need to play Last of Us. I'm really excited about the new AAA narrative experience from Sony. Yeah, I think a defining feature of that experience is that you are on a trajectory. You get a Nintendo, it's 8-bit, then it's 16-bit, then it's 3D, then the 3D gets better. It feels like we're on this journey and this very fast path forward.

1:10:39And part of the disconnect, I think, for me is that in many ways, Marathon feels like, yes, this is the logical next step. This feels like the new thing. It is complicating and tweaking and iterating and all this stuff that came before. it is really taking advantage of the fact that I have all this built-up knowledge over many years about what a game like this can be. And it actually requires it, as we've discussed. It requires a great deal of expertise. And I'm looking behind me like, Hey guys, let's all come to this next... What is the logical next good experience in this art form? and then you look back and you realize that the generations behind you are like not on this journey right it's like they have a completely different foundation which i i mean i think lends a lot of credence to to this theory that um this is this art form is not going to take the path that we have that millennials have been on it's taking a different path and i don't think it's a bad path.

1:11:53But it's very different. And a lot of the pain that we see in the industry right now in the form of layoffs and reductions and consolidation, it's not entirely a result of this. There's a lot of factors, macroeconomic factors that make this happen. But I do think that this is a readjustment for audience. It's like the millennial type of player is not replenishing. There's a new type of player that's coming up behind it. And this huge multi-billion dollar industry is struggling to adjust to that reality. And that's how you get one of the most respected game studios and one of the biggest game companies.

1:12:38They get their heads together and they're like, what are we going to do that's going to get people really excited? And then, as we've said, it's not an airball, right? It's not a complete miss, but it's just like, it's not cutting it. It's just like, it's not cutting it. And then I was looking, I was actually, there's an excellent newsletter from Simon Carlos. And he was talking about Mecha Chameleon or something like that. It's like a game that a team of two people made. You go into this match, you kind of try to, it's like a hide and seek game, essentially. and it sold like 10 million copies they made$50 million in a day and that's not as much money as Marathon made but the ROI is incredible you know what I mean and you look at this and you look at that and you're like okay it's like the times are changing it's like it's happening and again not against it I'm not going to sit here and shake my fist at the cloud but it is kind of haunting to see this hobby this thing that is kind of life defining for you change so clearly.

1:13:38Not so quickly because it's been happening for a while, but you're like, wow, it's happening. We're aging out, which is a very strange experience. I guess one last thing is if you look at the marathon subreddit, if you just are in any type of space where people talk about competitive shooters, something that's come up in the past few years is the idea, the concept of sweats. Yes. Which means, you've alluded to this, these are players that are essentially better than you. They're trying more than you. They're trying so hard, they're sweating. And you don't have the time or the skill to compete with them.

1:14:21Obviously, there's always been people who are better than you in online games. But I feel like the complaint as an existential issue is pretty new. Do you agree with that? And if so, why do you think that is? Why is the idea of Sweat a new thing? Is it new? I guess it's new-ish. So I think the problem is a lot of times when backlink games are predominantly single player and then you start having people play multiplayer, but maybe it's mostly local multiplayer, like people playing GoldenEye or Halo on a shared screen. People come away from that being like, I'm pretty good at video games. I'm pretty good at this.

1:15:00I'm solid at playing shooters. and then the second you connected people to the internet and you had ranked matchmaking become available, people rapidly learn that they're not, right? They're deeply average, maybe below average and their experience of playing these things multiplayer goes from, yeah, I win like, you know, I win half the time or more than half the time. It's great. And it becomes experience of I lose constantly. And I feel like there's studies on this that a 50-50 win rate feels like you're losing all the time. So if you're appropriately matched, you should be winning and losing about equally.

1:15:38That doesn't feel good. People don't want to do that. They want to win more than they lose. People will perceive it as if they're... They will perceive 50-50 as being like a 70-30 split, games lost versus games won. So a lot of people have this unpleasant awakening of, yeah, I'm just not that good at these games. but then you also have the phenomenon of in any sort of competitive game or multiplayer game, you have people who do take it very, very seriously and devote themselves to it. And it becomes a real problem, especially in team games, where you'll have people getting frustrated if you play suboptimally.

1:16:19Well, how are you going to learn how to play the game if people are yelling at you from the minute you show up and you're trying to learn it? in some ways your hardcore audience becomes like literally discouraging to new players. But then also you have the problem of the way sweats engage with games, the way they play them. They are trying to play them super efficiently. They are trying to get the most positive results, the most consistent results. And so they will also then play it in a really boring fashion. They will, you know, optimal is rarely fun. This is true across sports. This is true across everything.

1:17:00Inefficiency is where a lot of the fun lies. That's the nature of play. You don't play efficiently. But people who are like, I really want to win a lot of matches or I want to get the most loot for my time in these games, they will not be playing it to have fun. The fun for them is outcome. And so then they will be trying to bend everything around outcome rather than process. And process is supposed to be where the fun lives. but your sweats and the influence they have on the game begins to drain the fun out of the process and become an outcome-focused thing. And if you're a new player showing up to those spaces, it feels incredibly hostile.

1:17:38These people are much, much better than you. But then if you deal with them as teammates, most of them will not be fun to play with. Even if they are nice and they're trying to teach you the game, what they are teaching you is not a particularly fun version of the game because Helldivers ran into this too, where Helldivers, when you started playing it, woohoo, we're playing Starship Troopers team shooter thing. Use these abilities. Look at all this goofy shit you can do to these aliens. At this point, some of the things I've heard from higher level Helldivers right now is if you show up and you don't have the optimal build of call down powers and weaponry, people will be angry because you're wasting their time.

1:18:20and that is a problem because this is supposed to be fun. People are supposed to be like, I think I want to do this today. I want to use this. If you have people saying, you are screwing me over by treating this like a toy and I'm telling you that we need to take this seriously and play it this way, the people who are in it for fun are going to walk away. They're not going to want to play against these people and they're not going to play with them. And then that sort of hardcore audience will begin to consume itself. And I think a lot of developers, where they especially lose sight of the issue is they will start listening to their community, but the community is increasingly dominated by loud voices coming from the hardest core players who want very different things than what the sorts of more casual, more fun and exploration-focused players will want from their game.

1:19:17And so you end up in a trap of your dedicated audience, the people that are keeping this game afloat, are maybe also the people who are going to keep it from ever growing. And your dedicated audience are making all these demands and pushing your development in this direction. But you might be locally optimizing for the sickos who this is their one thing they want to play. And to get the tens of thousands of other players you need for this to become a viable business, you're going to have to make it a different game. You're going to have to make the people very angry. But in the process, they will try to burn down the community around you.

1:19:55So there's kind of two issues there. There's the sweats and the hardcore players as they exist in the match. And then there's kind of the influence they exert as a community management problem and business development problem. Yeah, I mean, I think that nails it from a purely selfish perspective. I hope it does well because I really enjoy the game. Do we want to talk about where this stands with Bungie right now? Like in terms of what is happening at Bungie? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, sure. Let's get into it. I mean, it's not nice. It's not good news. We've just had a terrible week of layoffs, if you want to get into that.

1:20:31Well, it's interesting. I think so. What has also happened, and this has also increased the sort of stench of failure around Marathon, is that Marathon comes out, and then Bungie starts firing tons of people. and you could say that's the verdict on Marathon, right? If Marathon was a success Bungie needed, they wouldn't be hemorrhaging jobs right and left. And that's true up to a point, but the story's more complicated than that. And in some ways, we're talking about the different environments things exist in. I think Bungie might be a studio that typifies how hard things have gotten out there.

1:21:10What has happened in the last week is Sony made the decision to effectively lay off the entire Destiny 2 team. After Bungie released the final shape, which was the final big expansion to Destiny, they were very clear that that main story of Destiny 2, that had been the story of Destiny since the game launched in 2014, that was over. But Destiny wasn't going away. It just wasn't making a lot of new Destiny stuff like The Final Shape or The Taken King or any of those things. And the game began to die off. And Bungie and Sony looked at the situation and sort of recent conclusion that it was no longer worth continuing to support Destiny as a major ongoing concern.

1:22:01And then they fired 220, I want to say 220, might have been almost 300 people as they let them go. But effectively, a lot of Bungie veterans and basically the entire Destiny 2 team were let go. However, for me, I think Marathon, even the decision to make it, is driven by the fact that Bungie were already staring down the barrel of a really challenging environment. made perhaps more challenging by the fact that Sony had spent all this money to acquire Bungie as part of its former CEO's push toward live service games. But think about this. Bungie, back when they made Marathon, between Marathon, I think, is like 93, 94.

1:23:01They become independent from Microsoft in 2007. I remember there's this big, they had a big town hall and Microsoft Studios games. If you remember from that time era of an Xbox, if it was like a first party game, you'd have the Microsoft Game Studios logo that comes up. And I want to say at this town hall, they had that familiar like Bungie logo comes up. A Microsoft Games studio comes up and then that like dissolves and it's like an independent studio. and the Bungie town hall goes wild and all this. Jason Schreier writes a little bit about this moment in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels on his chapter about Bungie and Microsoft execs being like, damn, were we that bad?

1:23:43Like, why are you guys so happy? But the important thing to remember is, let's say 1994 to 2007, Bungie makes Marathon, Marathon 2, Myth, Myth 2, Soul Blider, the entire Halo trilogy. They have inked a deal to make Halo reach an ODST. All of that is done between like the mid-90s and 2007. 2007, they're newly independent. What are we going to do? What are we going to do with all this independence? We don't have Microsoft forcing us to just make Halos anymore. What's our next big thing? And their answer to that ultimately turns out to be Destiny. Destiny starts taking shape across 2007, 2008. serious development starts work around like 2010 or somewhere in there.

1:24:30Bungie's effectively had the chance to make one big bet after it became independent. And they bet it on Destiny. There's an argument to be made that certainly like the studio shouldn't have been run in a way where they don't have any sort of parallel development meaningfully happening to like make it so they're not just a Destiny studio. But however it panned out, every studio gets to make fewer bets now because games take longer to make and you're hitting a higher quality bar. And so Bungie, you have all these great games made in a 10, 13-year span from the 90s and the mid-2000s. Since 2007, they closed out their Halo involvement and then they made Destiny, Destiny 2, a whole bunch of expansions.

1:25:19but we're talking almost 20 years of that studio being consumed by destiny. You do not get many chances to get things right in the industry anymore. You are steering battleships. And so the bet you make, it can take eight, 10 years to see if you were even close to the right answer. And that makes long-term planning scary. We usually like our little action consequence to be a little closer so we can see the impact of what we're doing. But you can say that Bungie made some key decisions about what we're going to be as a studio back in 2007. And they never got to really make a lot of important decisions again.

1:26:00Like, they said we're going to do Destiny, and it's been 20 years of working on Destiny. I think you don't mean it to sound this way, but I think the way you said it makes it sound like if it's a fact of life that they made these decisions. I think it was possible to make different decisions. The thing is that these decisions are so rooted in the moment that they're made. So it's really hard to get back there mentally. But if they are making decisions about what they want to do next in 2007, they're making that in the shadow of World of Warcraft. And the way that the world looked, the way this industry looked in 2007, is like World of Warcraft is going to eat the entire business.

1:26:44And it's like, if we don't make a World of Warcraft now, if we don't start making it now, it's over. Because the way it looked like there was just going to be World of Warcraft and maybe one other game, and then everything else would go away. And they made decisions to like, hey, how about we make a Halo World of Warcraft? And it's like, that's what they made. And that's how it turned out. And I think, unfortunately, it's like, I understand that... Sorry, just also, by the way, in terms of thinking about decisions decisions being rooted in time that they were made like this 30.7 billion dollar acquisition sounds so foolish now you have to go back to when they made that acquisition money was free it's like 3.6 3.6 it's like money was free back then like money wasn't money it's like people were acquiring things as if like money didn't exist and then the economy changed and now you're like oh no we spend billions of dollars and we have to make it back um but But I guess back to Simon Carlos's newsletter, it's like if I'm looking at the industry now and I'm running a studio and like, here we go again being like a backseat businessman.

1:27:53But I don't think that I would take my 300 person studio and make one big multi-billion dollar 10 year swing. I'd be like, go make 30 games and one of them will catch on and then we can reiterate. I think to what we were saying earlier, The idea that we just have to take these gigantic, you know, decade-long projects on is like just not how it works. It's just like not how people are playing games. But it's terrifying math for everyone because you go take 30 swings with those resources, but that is not how Bungie is set up to operate. These big AAA studios, they're specialized in... Again, you're an art history guy as well.

1:28:43The analogy in some ways, there's two analogies that I come back to a lot with video games, especially AAA ones. Cathedrals and opera. Cathedrals are generational construction projects where every element is in some ways calling for master craftsmen to come work on it. Opera comes into it because it's so multidisciplinary. right there's there's acting there's writing there's there's an orchestra there's there's painting there's dance all these things but video games are like they're full making these things requires especially at these studios they're huge because they have huge numbers of specialized craftsmen that cannot easily turn how about you guys just turn around go and turn around tiny game that's not how they are that's not how they're set up to operate the other thing is uh To your point, I am certain that Bungie probably did feel pressure in 2007 to speak to the trends they saw, which was, we need to go and figure out how to make the Bungie equivalent of World of Warcraft.

1:29:49And I suspect when Jim Ryan, greenlit acquiring Bungie, what he was looking at was, oh, shit. Gaming habits are changing and players are just getting locked into things like Roblox, Fortnite, etc. And you never see them again. And so you better get cracking on making your own equivalent to that. But this is why we need to go all in on live service games because live service games are sort of devouring our audience. So we need to go all in on making some bets and seeing how we can get some of the action that Epic has with Fortnite, what EA has with EA Sports Games, etc. But where I think executives come in for some just criticism here is, unfortunately, if you are helming a battleship, you can't try and chase.

1:30:40You're not agile enough. oh you identify the trend too late you missed it like you can't bungie can't hit the gas and go chasing like world of warcraft it's 2007 it's going to take too long uh oh you you missed out on the fortnight moment that moment is past you can't buy tons of studios and pivot sony video games to live service you kind of have to figure things out but everyone is trying to and we've worked at companies, we've seen how this works. You need stories to tell people about like, why you have a vision for success. And we're going to do the same thing. But you know, we're going to do it well and do it better is not a story that inspires confidence.

1:31:24We worked in media during days when media was like creating cratering right and left. There's a lot of things I can hold against vice and vice leadership. And it was a very silly company in a lot of ways. But the thing I've always had sympathy with is you couldn't go to investors and be like, we're going to run good journalistic stories. We're going to package them well and readers will show up. Yeah, everyone's trying that. They're getting their teeth kicked in because the business dynamics have completely changed. The revenue models have completely collapsed. So you need to come up with some sort of different story to tell people to keep the investments coming in.

1:32:02And that's also true at companies like... For a studio like Bungie, you have to have a story you're telling to get people to invest in your game and sell them on the pitch. For someone like Jim Ryan, who's overseeing Sony, you have to have a story you're telling to investors on public markets about what the vision is for the growth of Sony moving forward. Because the thing you're up against is... It sounds really good if you're saying, well, this game... We released a game, it doubled its money. if you just sank a ton of money into an S &P 500 index fund you will double your money in eight years which is about how long it takes to make these games now and so the notion that you know you have this pressure of these resources can be sent anywhere they can be sent to other projects in the company but also we were speaking to investors who have oodles and oodles of capital who can just literally throw that stuff in the equivalent of the stock market savings account and possibly outperform the greatest fruits of your craftsmanship and labor.

1:33:05And so you come up with more ambitious pitches and more compelling stories to try to convince these people that they should let their money ride with you and trust what you're heading towards. And you end up in some ways taking swings that maybe in retrospect seem ill-advised. Maybe you look back and you're saying, well, Destiny was a lot of fun. A lot of people really loved it. But given how things have panned out, was that really the direction that you should have gone? And there were people at Bungie who didn't think it should have. They purged out a lot of the people who didn't want to go with the Destiny direction.

1:33:42But also, it is entirely possible that it was kind of the Destiny direction or no direction. That there weren't going to be takers for a lot of other visions of what Bungie's next big project should be. And so they kind of had to pitch something that was like, we're going to mash together Halo and World of Warcraft, and we're going to make infinite money forever. And they may have known that was going to be hard, and they may have known that wasn't really realistic, but it was the song and dance you had to do to get people to trust that Bungie not just still had it, but we're going to turn your investment into a genre-defining performance.

1:34:22I think if I was a Bungie, the pitch that I would make, the story I would tell is not all that different than the story we try to tell advice, which is we're making something really cool. Trust me, bro. Trust me. It will work out. And just do that until you run out of runway. That would be my advice. Well, I think especially if I'm... The thing I would say if I was at a high level with these companies is that the trends may not be good with Marathon. Things may not be looking good with Bungie. But what are you going to do? Once you tear up these studios, what you've now done is you've destroyed the...

1:35:08You've destroyed institutional knowledge. You've destroyed capacity. You're not going to easily get those things back. and so you can do that if you're running scared and you're saying the burn rate at the studio how much it is costing to keep these people employed in you know Washington State etc you can panic and say like we can't afford to keep doing this we need to start like shutting all these people and that's kind of the direction they're moving in and maybe they'll do that to the marathon team as well but the argument really is that you spent a lot of money on to acquire an asset that could produce good games you missed on a bet probably a bet that was shaped by the constraints of having to maintain destiny in the background and sort of create a project that was a little more like scoped like given a slightly smaller scope it's a nice thing the distraction shooters are for they take a very small amount of content to make it do a lot of games for people but I look at it now you can panic and just start keep lopping off limbs of the studio but now that studio that you paid those billions of dollars for literally can do significantly less than it did.

1:36:17Now you can't even make bets with it. And so now you're panicking and you're sort of... It's not even like Goodfellas burning down the restaurant because there you had insurance. That's not what's happening here. This isn't like the private equity stripping for parts. You paid a fortune for a thing that can make really high quality games of a certain type. and now you're kind of showing you don't have the stomach or the money to stay in on using those resources to go play other bets and if you continue laying these people off you know when you turn around like well what's Bungie's next pitch it'll be even less compelling and I think that is probably the argument for Marathon at this stage is look it exists it's good we know how to make it if you just cut if you kill this game what other new launch has really blown up huge for you what other games in the space are really showing this is how you launch one of these and be successful in 2026 this is pretty short to non-existent and so in a weird way I think the the actual pitch is you're stuck in here with me right that's kind of a weird one to use in the corporate context but like those are your choices like you can't continue cutting bungee and killing these ips that you've invested a lot of resources into and then think well we just need to free them up to come up with their next big idea their next big idea isn't going to be big and they won't be able to execute on it nearly as well because you just like shot them in in both feet and the kneecaps and you're somehow expecting them to come back with well I'm sure the next one will be a hit so in some ways that is the real pitch Emmanuel whether or not it's the next Rainbow Six Siege or not it's what you got you just publicly shot Destiny in the head so now there's Marathon and after Marathon there's nothing and if you do another round of layoffs at Bungie Bungie is going to be a shadow of its former self and so this is kind of the time where it's you probably need to start figuring out how to deploy the resources that you have even if they are costing you money because the alternative is basically saying well we just spent 3.6 billion dollars for nothing and all the money we've invested in Marathon, Destiny to date all of that is all of that is a smoking ruin okay I think we'll leave that there please support Remap Radio so you can listen to Rob and Patrick and Chia talk about this and much more every week, several times a week watch their streams, read their website as a reminder, 4-4 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

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